“Hi mom, my phone dropped. This is my new number.” Here is the new scam on WhatsApp
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“Hi mom, my phone dropped. This is my new number.’ It is with this WhatsApp message that scammers now try to ensnare their victims. They fake a problem with a very close family member and then, the next step, they ask for money.
It must be said that in terms of scams, ingenuity is always fertile. It usually targets people less accustomed to technology but, for some time now, it has increasingly exploited the surprise factor and played on the emotional side of the victims. The result is always the same: cash payments that disappear or, worse still, bank accounts emptied. The channel that is used more and more is that of instant messaging applications such as WhatsApp which are now used by everyone and therefore reach a huge number of potential victims. Messages are sent en masse, whoever replies is immediately profiled. Fraudsters immediately strike up a dialogue to figure out how far they can go. In some cases I only ask to make an urgent top-up for the expenses that the child has to bear to go home, in other cases instead they steal access to the current account and then make transfers that will disappear abroad.
What to do? The Online State Police Commissariat – Web User Safety Desk warns: These scams “often present themselves as harmless messages which in reality have the purpose of hooking the victim to urge him to communicate personal data”.
«If you receive a message from your child who warns you that he has broken the phone and asks you to save his new number among the contacts in the address book, it could be a scam – say the experts of the PS Commissariat -. The first message will be followed by unusual requests for money, the top-up of a prepaid card, the credentials to access the current account».
The advice is not to reply to the message, to cancel the conversation and, if the number has been saved, to immediately delete it from the address book.
In any case, the number one rule is to never provide the coordinates of your current account or other financial instruments. When requests for this type of data arrive, one should always be suspicious. Even if the situation appears to be emergency.
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